Remember this ball?Adidas, who created it prior to the 1970 World Cup called it the `Telstar'. The formal name is truncated icosahedron. My kampong mates called it `bola', for obvious reasons.
It is made up of 32 panels; twelve are pentagons (the black ones), and twenty are hexagons. Mind you, many cartoonists got the colours the other way around, or even the shapes wrong.
Why this combination of geometrical shapes? It is simply because this is the most effective way of creating a nearly spherical object from flat panels. Any other combination of regular shapes will result in the ball having unsatisfactory bulges and points.
More on that next time...
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